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Monthly Archives: November 2010

….director Wim Wenders took possession of his star by lying down next to it. And then he declared: “I wanted to have the view that the star has: The sky over Berlin.” He feels extremely comfortable between Fritz Lang and Bruno Ganz: “What else could one want?”….. note: ‘The Sky over Berlin’ is the German, original title of ‘Wings of Desire’

On the center strip of the Potsdamer road, between Ben Gurion road and Potsdamer place, from now on film-creatives are honoured from 120 years of German cinema history with a star let in into the ground.

32. The Thyrsus

For Franz Liszt

What is a thyrsus? According to the moral and poetic definition, it is a sacerdotal symbol in the hands of priests or priestesses celebrating the divinity of which they are the interpreters and the servants. But physically it is only a baton, a pure baton, a hop-pole, a vine-stake, dry, hard, and straight. Around this baton, in capricious meanderings, play and frolic vine-stems and flowers, the first sinuous and fugitive, the second bent over like bells or like overturned goblets. And an astonishing glory leaps from that complexity of lines and of colors, whether tender or showy. Might one not say that the curved line and the spiral court the straight line and dance around it in mute adoration? Might one not say that all of these delicate corollas, all of these calyxes, explosions of scent and of color, perform a mystical fandango around the hieratic baton? And yet, who is the foolhardy mortal who would dare to determine whether the flowers and the vine-branches were made for the baton, or if the baton is only the pretext for displaying the beauty of the vine-branches and the flowers? The thyrsus is the representation of your astonishing duality, powerful and venerated master, dear Bacchant of mysterious and passionate Beauty. Never did a nymph inflamed by invincible Bacchus shake her thyrsus over the heads of her maddened companions with as much energy and capriciousness as you agitate your genius over the hearts of your brothers. — The baton is your will, straight, firm, and unshakeable; the flowers are your fancy promenading around your will; it is the feminine element executing around the male its marvelous pirouettes. Straight line and arabesque line, intention and expression, rigidity of the will, sinuosity of the word, unity of the end, variety of the means, all-powerful and indivisible amalgam of genius, what analyst would have the detestable courage to divide you and to separate you?

Dear Liszt, through the mists, beyond the rivers, over the cities where the pianos sing your glory, where the printer conveys your wisdom, wherever you are, in the splendors of the eternal city or in the mists of the dreamy lands that console Cambrinus, improvising songs of delectation or of ineffable sorrow, or confiding to paper your abstruse meditations, bard of eternal Delight and Anguish, philosopher, poet, and artist, I salute you in immortality!

I looked in front of meIn the crowd I saw youAmong the wheat I saw youBeneath a tree I saw youAt the end of my journeysIn the depths of my tormentAt the corner of every smileEmerging from water and fireSummer and winter I saw youAll through my house I saw youIn my arms I saw youIn my dreams I saw youI will never leave you.